Even before the results of the April general election are in, a new majority is emerging on the Burbank City Council whose members state they will order a referendum on the controversial issue of airport expansion. The anti-expansion bloc not only intends to ensure that the public will be heard, but is determined to see plans for a larger Burbank Airport scaled back, according to interviews following last week's primary election.

The National Peasants Party said Friday that it supports the decision of the National Salvation Front, Romania's provisional government, to abandon plans for a referendum on the death penalty and on outlawing the Communist Party. The Peasants Party has emerged as the leading political group in the country since the revolution that ousted the dictator Nicolae Ceausescu last month. Its support could help rally public opinion behind the front, which has flip-flopped on the two issues.

Cautiously encouraged by signs of a break in the Lithuanian impasse, the Bush Administration appeared Wednesday to endorse the Soviet call for a referendum among Lithuanians to decide whether the Baltic state should become independent of the Soviet Union. Secretary of State James A. Baker III also seemed upbeat about the prospects for setting specific dates for the next U.S.-Soviet summit, despite the Lithuanian crisis.

Confronted by thousands of angry protesters who had come together for a day of national mourning, interim President Ion Iliescu declared Friday that the Communist Party of Romania has been outlawed. Speaking from a balcony at the Foreign Ministry in Bucharest, where the new government makes its headquarters, Iliescu said, "The Romanian Communist Party is outlawed, considering that it is against the national spirit and our ancestors' law." "Down with communism! Down with Communists!"

Buena Park voters will have the final say over whether "safe and sane fireworks" can be sold within city limits following a petition drive by opponents of the proposed ban that forced the City Council to put the issue on the ballot. The council voted 3 to 2 this year to ban fireworks in the interest of safety.

Several thousand opponents of President Hugo Chavez marched in Caracas, the capital, Saturday to protest what they condemned as political persecution and to demand a referendum on the leftist leader's rule. Chanting "Liberty!" and waving national flags, the protesters assailed what they called the illegal detention of opposition supporters during pro-referendum demonstrations in late February and early this month that ended in violence.

Voters overwhelmingly cleared the way for Egypt's first contested presidential election, according to referendum returns released Thursday. Government opponents dismissed the results. It was a day of mixed news for President Hosni Mubarak as the White House denounced the beating of protesters during Wednesday's vote. "The idea of people expressing themselves in opposition to the government, and then getting a beating, is not our view of how democracy ought to work," President Bush said.

In a victory for the Vatican but a setback for supporters of women's reproductive rights, low turnout during two days of voting killed a referendum that would have lifted many limits in Italy's restrictive fertility law, officials said Monday. When the polls closed in the afternoon, only about 26% of eligible voters had cast ballots in a complicated, four-point referendum.

Voters in Buena Park next week might become the first Orange County community in years to pass a school bond issue. The $13.8-million referendum to mend overflowing toilets, rewire schools for increased computer capacity, rip out rusty pipes and recondition heating-and-cooling systems is backed by school and city officials and the chamber of commerce. Not only is there no organized opposition, but no one even filed an argument against the measure in the voter pamphlet.

Theobald Wolfe Tone, the leader of a failed Irish rebellion in 1798, slit his throat with a penknife while in British custody rather than accept that his dream of a free and united Ireland had been shattered. After 200 years and thousands of war dead, the heirs to Tone's nationalist struggle say they are fed up with violence. Today, they are expected to adopt a peace agreement that will, in effect, sanction Northern Ireland's union with Britain.